Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901): Uprising and Siege of the Legations

The Boxer Rebellion was an anti-foreign and anti-Christian uprising in northern China between 1899 and 1901, which in the summer of 1900 grew into a war between the Qing dynasty and an alliance of eight foreign powers. Its most famous episode was the 55-day siege of the foreign legations in Beijing, ended by an international relief force on 14 August 1900. The defeat led to the punishing Boxer Protocol of 1901 and further weakened the Qing state in its final decade.

Background: a China under pressure

By the 1890s the Qing Empire had suffered decades of defeats and unequal treaties, from the Opium Wars, including the Second Opium War, to the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. After Japan’s victory, the European powers scrambled for concessions. Germany seized Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong in November 1897 after two German missionaries were murdered; Russia leased Port Arthur, and Britain took Weihaiwei.

Foreign missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, had the right to work in the interior under the treaties. Some intervened in local lawsuits on behalf of Chinese converts, which caused deep resentment among non-Christian villagers and officials. Railways and telegraph lines, built with foreign money, were blamed for disturbing the harmony of the land and for putting carters and boatmen out of work.

In Beijing, the reforming Guangxu Emperor’s Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 ended in a coup by the conservative Empress Dowager Cixi, who placed the emperor under house arrest. Court politics turned increasingly hostile to foreigners.

The rise of the Boxers

The Boxer movement emerged in western Shandong in 1898–1899, in a region struck by a catastrophic Yellow River flood in 1898 and then by drought. Its members, mostly young peasants and labourers, practised martial arts and spirit-possession rituals and believed these made them immune to swords and bullets. They called themselves the Yihequan, “Righteous and Harmonious Fists”, and later the Yihetuan, or militia. Their best-known slogan was “Support the Qing, destroy the foreign”. Foreign residents, seeing their boxing-like exercises, simply called them “Boxers”, and the name stuck in Western languages. The movement had no single leader or central organisation; it spread village by village through local masters, and young women formed their own groups, the Red Lanterns.

Boxer groups attacked Chinese Christians, burned churches and killed missionaries. The British missionary Sidney Brooks was killed in Shandong on 31 December 1899. When Yuan Shikai became governor of Shandong in December 1899 he suppressed the movement there, but it spread rapidly into Zhili, the metropolitan province around Beijing and Tianjin. By spring 1900 bands of Boxers were tearing up railway lines and entering the capital itself.

Intervention and war

As the danger grew, the foreign legations in Beijing brought in about 400 guards in late May and early June 1900. On 10 June the British admiral Sir Edward Seymour set out from Tianjin with about 2,000 sailors and marines to reinforce them, but his column was blocked by Boxers and Qing troops and forced to turn back.

On 11 June the Japanese diplomat Sugiyama Akira was killed by Qing soldiers in Beijing. On 17 June allied warships captured the Taku (Dagu) forts guarding the approach to Tianjin. The court interpreted this as an act of war. On 20 June the German minister Clemens von Ketteler was shot dead in the street on his way to the Zongli Yamen (foreign office), and the next day, 21 June 1900, the Qing court issued an edict declaring war on the foreign powers.

Not all of China followed. The powerful governors-general of the south and centre, including Li Hongzhang, Zhang Zhidong and Liu Kunyi, ignored the declaration and agreed with the foreign consuls to keep order in their regions, an arrangement known as the Mutual Protection of Southeast China. The war was therefore confined largely to the north.

The siege of the legations

From 20 June 1900 the legation quarter in Beijing was besieged by Boxers and regular Qing troops, including the Gansu army of General Dong Fuxiang. Inside were around 470 foreign civilians, roughly 400 soldiers and marines from eight nations and some 3,000 Chinese Christians. The British minister, Sir Claude MacDonald, took overall command of the defence.

The defenders held a shrinking perimeter of walls, barricades and buildings under rifle and artillery fire. A nearby library, the Hanlin Academy, was burned during the fighting. A truce in mid-July eased the pressure, and some historians argue that the court, divided between hardliners such as Prince Duan and moderates such as Ronglu, never committed its full strength to taking the legations. Separately, about 3,000 Chinese Catholics and a small detachment of French and Italian sailors held out in the Beitang, the Northern Cathedral, under Bishop Alphonse Favier.

The relief of Beijing and reprisals

The allies took the walled city of Tianjin on 14 July 1900 after hard fighting. A relief force of about 20,000 men, mostly Japanese and Russian with British, American and French troops, marched from Tianjin on 4 August, defeated Qing forces on the way and reached Beijing on 14 August. The legations were relieved that day and the Beitang on 16 August.

Cixi, the Guangxu Emperor and the court fled west in disguise to Xi’an. For months Beijing and the surrounding region were occupied, and soldiers of all the allied armies took part in looting. The German field marshal Alfred von Waldersee arrived in September as nominal commander-in-chief and launched dozens of punitive expeditions into the countryside. In a speech at Bremerhaven on 27 July 1900, Kaiser Wilhelm II had urged departing German troops to show no mercy and to make the name of Germany feared in China, as the Huns of Attila had once been feared, a speech that later gave rise to the British wartime label “Huns” for Germans.

The death toll is uncertain. Boxers and Qing troops killed more than 200 foreign missionaries and their family members, including 44 or more men, women and children executed at Taiyuan in July 1900 on the orders of the Shanxi governor Yuxian. Far more Chinese Christians died: estimates commonly cite about 30,000 Catholics and around 2,000 Protestants.

Chinese losses in the fighting and the allied reprisals were much larger and are poorly recorded; many thousands of Boxers, soldiers and civilians were killed. In July 1900 Russian forces drove thousands of Chinese residents of Blagoveshchensk on the Amur River into the water, where most drowned, and Russia went on to occupy Manchuria.

The Boxer Protocol

After long negotiations, conducted for China by Li Hongzhang and Prince Qing, the Boxer Protocol was signed on 7 September 1901 with eleven powers. Its main terms were:

• an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver, paid over 39 years with interest, bringing the total to around 980 million taels;
• the execution or exile of officials who had supported the Boxers, and an apology mission to Germany and Japan;
• a permanent foreign-guarded legation quarter in Beijing and the right to station troops along the route to the sea;
• the destruction of the Taku forts, a two-year ban on arms imports and the suspension of the civil service examinations in towns where foreigners had been attacked.

The court returned to Beijing in January 1902.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1897, November: Germany seizes Jiaozhou Bay after missionaries are killed in Shandong.
• 1898–1899: The Boxer movement spreads through western Shandong.
• 1900, 10 June: The Seymour expedition leaves Tianjin for Beijing.
• 1900, 17 June: Allied forces capture the Taku forts.
• 1900, 20 June: Von Ketteler is killed; the siege of the legations begins.
• 1900, 21 June: The Qing court declares war on the foreign powers.
• 1900, 14 July: Allied troops capture Tianjin.
• 1900, 14 August: The relief force enters Beijing and lifts the siege.
• 1901, 7 September: The Boxer Protocol is signed.

Legacy

The Boxer defeat convinced Cixi that change was unavoidable. From 1901 the court launched the New Policies, a programme of reforms that modernised the army, schools and administration and in 1905 abolished the centuries-old examination system. The reforms came too late to save the dynasty, which fell in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911.

The indemnity was a heavy burden on Chinese finances for decades. The United States later returned part of its share to fund scholarships for Chinese students, which led to the founding of what became Tsinghua University. In the West the siege became a popular adventure story, retold in memoirs, novels and the Hollywood film 55 Days at Peking (1963), often with little attention to the Chinese Christians who made up most of those inside the defences or to the conduct of the allied armies afterwards; in China the Boxers have been seen in turn as superstitious fanatics and as early patriotic resisters of imperialism.

Why it matters

The Boxer Rebellion was the last great attempt by the old Qing order to drive out foreign influence by force, and its failure exposed China’s weakness more starkly than ever. It deepened foreign control, burdened the country with debt, and helped set in motion the reforms and revolution that ended two thousand years of imperial rule.